1900

Saw 1900, a film about Italy and fascism. It follows the fate of two boys, one born to a wealthy landowner and the other born to a clan of peasants. The peasant boy, Olmo, is of uncertain parentage thus cementing him as the true son of the soil. Indeed, he claims he listens to his missing father in wells and bottles and in telegraph poles. The other child, Alfredo, is chubby and a little spoiled. We establish the two as friends that their friendship may stand for the brotherhood of man in the coming conflict, which is framed almost entirely as a class conflict.

This film is squarely on the side of the peasants which is to say the socialists (at first anyway. There's nuance.) At first, in the pre-war pseudo-feudal times, the peasants fight back by passively suffering at the landowner. He is disgusted by them and by their suffering and this strategy is almost totally ineffective but leads to one fairly freaky scene of a farmer mutilating himself as an act of protest. Soon however, the fascists are on the rise. Fascism is personified by Attila, the ghastly head of security at the farm, played powerfully by Donald Sutherland. He establishes himself as a horrible character by gruesomely killing what he deems to be a 'parasitical' cat. Dead cats make more appearances and seem to symbolize the upper class; beautiful, but lazy.

The rich kid meanwhile is trying to escape all of this with his decadent art-dealer uncle who spends most of his time floating through fancy hotels, indulging in cocaine and in pictures of picturesque arrangements of naked young men. The uncle introduces Alfredo to a beautiful, wild woman who drives fast cars, makes scenes at parties, and writes futurist poetry. She of course symbolizes art and hates the fascists who are by this point squat men with squat clubs who ride around in trucks, hassling the poor folk. She is established as an irrelevant flibbertigibbet who is nonetheless useful to us viewers as a voice of judgement.

The film finally ends with the worst excesses of cruelty by Attila-the-fascist and the sudden glorious liberation of Italy by the communists. By this point, the film has accomplished its goal. The film opens with the final communist revolution. We witness teenage boys merrily holding old men at gunpoint and see an old and a well-dressed couple murdered with pitchforks. We then flash back to see how we got to this point. What repulsed us at first now pleases us: the well-dressed couple was Attila and his equally-ghastly wife. The orgy of celebration at the end of the film is dampened when, at the end of the day, as the sun is going down, the communist partisans demand that the peasants turn in their guns to the state. An ominous ending to an already difficult period in Italy's history.

The film is epic. It's five hours long and takes its time. There are no tedious or indulgent drawn-out scenes, merely a lot of stuff happening for five hours. It's also a difficult film to watch. For all the playful joy of the boys wrestling and play-fighting, what I'll remember most from this film is the animals being slaughtered, the peasants being shot, and the ghastly image of Donald Sutherland receiving a blowjob while he rants about his fascist dystopia. Joking aside, there's a lot of animal cruelty in this film. It has the feel of a medieval story, earthily unconcerned with the realities of meat production and more concerned with the human spirit. How power corrupts and how the poor are exploited again and again. The film has no illusions about the reign of the communists. It is guilty of assuming some saintliness of the poor, but I think this is a weakness I'll allow it. An epic film, moving and beautiful. I recommend it (if you can stand the run-time.)